If lenders can eventually update a system once which then feeds and updates everything else, that must be our goal.
Paul Hunt is a marketing consultant
In recent months, I have been using the phrase ‘one version of the truth’ a lot to illustrate a point, but today a recent blog post (in another industry) has led me to question whether I’m using the right terminology.
I’ve worked in a mortgage club, lenders and a broker/estate agency business and so I have seen many instances in our sector where supposedly the same information is held in various places, but it is found to differ, leading to the wrong information being given internally, externally or used to base decisions upon.
As a lender, for example, when you change a piece of criteria you have to update your website, all your documentation (product guides, lending manuals, internal policy notes etc.), external systems i.e. Knowledge Bank and then you have the spreadsheets used by many of the distributors (all in different formats, asking slightly different questions to add to the complexity).
With all the above, it’s no surprise that mistakes happen. But any mistake, no matter how minor, can lead to the wrong information being used by a broker for their client and so surely we can all do better in the 21st century to minimise this likelihood?
This leads me back to my one version of the truth phrase, as I have been using this to explain what we need to see happen, as if lenders can eventually update a system once which then feeds and updates everything else, that must be our goal.
The blog I read, see it here, says that how can there be a version of the truth, as the truth is the truth and that’s a difficult point to argue against! Therefore, they argue that a more accurate phrase should be “when there is one correct answer we should know what it is”. As a marketer, I feel it’s not a great phrase, so how about ‘truth, share, repeat’?
